Employee selection methods are vast important matters for every kind of company cause employee selection serves as the organization’s main conduit for human resources. Present-day managers are challenged to find the best available talent for the organization.
Employee Selection Methods
The manager’s first step in the selection process involves, except for job openings at the lowest entry-level, choosing between inside and outside talent.
Usually, outsiders are hired for bottom-rung positions in the organizational hierarchy. But what about the many positions above the lowest entry-level whether recently created or vacated?
Management can promote a current employee from the same geographic location, transfer to a current position from another place, or hire an outsider. The following are the advantages of promoting an insider or hiring an outsider.
Except at the lowest level of entry, the manager’s first step in the selection process involves choosing between inside and outside talent.
Advantages of promoting an insider
Three advantages of promoting an insider are:
- Promotion from within is less expensive than transferring or hiring,
- Promotable insiders are proven performers; and
- Promotion from within can have a position motivational effect.
In recent years, both inflationary pressure and more complicated hiring practices have caused hiring and transfer costs to skyrocket.
Employment agency fees, recruitment, advertising, testing, interviewing, reference checks, medical examinations, reimbursement or relocation expenses, and orientating run-up expenses quickly. Avoiding these hiring and transferring costs has become a powerful incentive to find and promote qualified insiders.
Hiring one from outside is much more expensive than promoting an insider.
Management runs the risk that one who looks good on paper may not prove good at actual work which is placed in a new and unfamiliar environment. To a certain extent, promotable insiders can demonstrate their worth. Evidence of an insider’s worth comes from direct observation, whereas management can use only second-hand information in evaluating an outsider.
It is much easier to judge the ability of an insider than an outsider candidate.
Experience tells that people tend to work harder when they believe they have a good chance of being promoted. Moreover, a competitive and emulating spirit tends to grow when employees see that deserving co-workers are promoted to better paying higher status jobs.
Dead-end jobs, on the other hand, tend to stifle motivation and commitment. Promotion from within, when regularly and fairly used, can be a potent motivational tool.
A fair policy of promotion from within can be a potent motivational tool.
Advantages of Bringing in an outsider
Over the policy of pro-mooting from inside, there are three advantages of transferring in or hiring an outsider:
- Bringing in outsiders helps prevent social inbreeding,
- Training costs are reduced when a qualified outsider is hired; and
- New people tend to introduce new perspectives.
Undesirable social inbreeding occurs when people are promoted on the basis of who they know rather than what they know. Bringing in someone new can cut out any automatic cycle of favoritism that may exist.
Bringing someone new who possesses the necessary qualifications can stimulate a healthy working environment and save expenditure.
Resorting to transferring or hiring also tends to keep down training costs. An insider who lacks the skills necessary for a higher position must be trained before the promotion is possible. Consequently, there is a strong economic argument for bringing in someone who already possesses the necessary skills.
Newcomers bring along new ideas and perspectives.
New people can be an infusion of new blood into an organization. They bring new perspectives, new ideas, and probing questions that can stimulate thinking among the present employees. Newcomers can introduce a healthy questioning attitude about an organization’s assumptions and can motivate the present employees to develop their own abilities.
Management should think about balance before hiring someone from outside and then go on to screen recruits systematically.
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